Most radio stations employ a music director to select and schedule music and other multimedia programming for airplay. A typical music director is responsible for interacting with record company reps, auditioning new music, and making decisions (sometimes in conjunction with a program director) as to which songs get airplay, how much and when. At most radio stations today, the music director devises rotations for songs and programs of the daily music through specialized music software made just for this purpose.
A typical FM radio station, for example, may air a national show weekdays in a 4 pm to 5 pm slot. The content for such a show may be scheduled out of another FM radio station, typically located geographically distant from other associated radio stations. The show's content is sent to the other stations within a radio station network for hand-placement in a local GSelector database of music, audio and other multimedia content.
Music directors often have difficulty in evenly programming local rotations to prevent clashes with network programs. If the music director fails to account for the content of network programming that runs next to local programming, the listener could be exposed to repeated programming. Music directors often hand-place songs to try and prevent theses clashes between network and local programming. It is difficult, however, for a music director to adjust local program content in a way that will prevent programming clashes with the network programming later in the day yet still maintain good rotation of the local content. The music director would probably not recognize programming clashes between the local and network show in the hours long before the network show. Only as the music director approaches the network hours would the director see the programming clashes. Having to re-program much of the day's content to correct the clashing rotations is inefficient.
A possible solution to this programming clash is hand-placing content backwards in the local show, starting from the time slot of the local programming that is closest to the network programming. Once the songs for the network show have been placed into the schedule, the music director for each station could then work backwards from the beginning of that show, hand placing the local songs in high-turnover categories. These categories typically have, for example, between three and nine songs. If the music director begins song placement in the hour time slot immediately preceding the network show, the director can take into account the actual music content of the network show to maintain even rotations in the local show. Therefore, a need exists to provide an efficient system and method for controlling a reverse scheduling order per category in a multimedia scheduling system.